It starts out fun, but over time guitar practice can become anything but. In other words, boredom kicks in and before you know it, you’re dreading those practice sessions that you may have once given up anything for.
Of course, it’s hard to identify just why you’ve lost the fun-factor from these sessions without looking at your individual schedule. However, there are some common mistakes, and we’ll now take a look at some of the best ways to finally bring back the enjoyment-factor to these practice sessions.
The key to a fun session is trackable progress
In the words of Tom Hess, tracking progress is absolutely paramount to keeping spirits up during practice. This should hardly come as a surprise, after all, if your guitar practice doesn’t have any end goal – just why are you there in the first place?
Therefore, before each and every practice session set a goal. Better yet, if you stick to long-term goals, it can give you a sense of eagerness prior to each session.
The best practice sessions, or the most fun in the case of this guide, are performed by those people who really take their goal tracking seriously. As well as carrying out all of the above, if you can note down each and every goal on paper it just aids the tracking process, and this should correlate with your enjoyment levels as well.
It’s not all about playing – listening is key as well
As this page is dedicated to guitar practice sessions, this next suggestion might raise a few eyebrows. However, most professional teachers will insist that you give some of your time into listening to guitar-based music that you enjoy. By doing this, you can immediately spark inspiration – and then carry this out into a practice session.
The concept behind this is that you will be reminded just why you want to play guitar. In some ways, it’s a form of motivation, and if you can be motivated prior to your practice session there’s every chance that you will just enjoy it a lot more.
Learning is fun
Sometimes, we forget the reasons why we engage in practice sessions. A lot of amateur guitar players will proceed to practice the same thing over and over again – without learning anything new. Suffice to say, this approach isn’t going to do you any good whatsoever and over time boredom will kick in.
Therefore, you need to insist that each session you engage in is going to promote a new skill. It might be small, but that doesn’t matter – the point is that you are going to benefit at least in some way from it.
The new skill might be from your teacher, from an online resource or even a friend – but the main thing is to keep your sessions fresh. Some people might find that these new skills come in just once a week – it will vary from player to player.